And the Forecast says....

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Saturnine Pariah, Mar 13, 2014.

  1. Maggnum Registered Member

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    Although rpenner has already utterly destroyed your zombie argument (deje vu again) I want to also point out a couple of other items related to this pretend failure in the prediction of surface temperature. Besides the well known cherry-picking of one of the hottest years ever recorded as the starting point for this so called "hiatus", most of the deniers who present this evidence depend on the temperature records of HADCRUT3 and HADCRUT4 in supporting their conjecture. In both cases, the global temperatures show a cold bias, given that neither of them included the temperatures of the whole planet, including areas of the greatest warming (such as the arctic, mid Africa and areas in Asia) (See Cowtan, K. and Way, R. G. (2014), Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc.. doi: 10.1002/qj.2297) a situation that has been known since at least 2007. GISS and HADSST2 suffer from the same bias. This means that the so called "hiatus" is anything but, and temperature rise still matched the lower end predictions set out by the IPCC in even their earliest reports.

    Further, there has been a great deal of work done on understanding why there is a slower rise than expected in the "business as usual" scenarios. A number of factors have been identified, from volcanic aerosols from low to mid-level volcanic eruptions (Santer et al, Volcanic contribution to decadal changes in tropospheric temperature Nature Geoscience 7, (2014)) to equatorial Pacific ocean cooling (Kosaka & Xie, Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Nature (2013)) to higher than expected Pacific ocean surface water overturn (England et al Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus Nature Climate Change 4, 222–227 (2014)). And there is more.

    This is a zombie argument that just won't die, and those that continue to use it to support their denialism are guilty of exactly that: denialism.
     
    Last edited: Mar 20, 2014
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  3. Maggnum Registered Member

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    Only a small cadre of denialists and conspiracists who continue to hold a minority opinion made to seem larger by "balanced" reporting by laymen.
     
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  5. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    4,098
    Great post. Thanks for writing it down Unfortunately so many 'believe' the only real arguments are the zombie arguments. If the human race ignores the consequences of its 'negative manipulation of mother earth' then the human race [IE everybody] is going to get what they deserve. Unfathomable that it's coming to this. A stubborn failure to recognize danger, correlated with our collective behavior, and the consequences.
     
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  7. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed, excellent post, Maggnum. Welcome to SciForums. Your post #21 looks like a couple of threads worth of excellent discussion material. What a relief to have someone join with the intent to contribute both wisdom and honesty. Outstanding, and an excellent complement to quality of posts that just preceded you (rpenner).
     
  8. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, I see.

    So do you now understand why you were wrong?
     
  9. Maggnum Registered Member

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    Thanks for the kind words and the welcome! There is so much information out there regarding co2 warming of the atmosphere it simply amazes me that there are still those who would deny the obvious. I add my voice when I can

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  10. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Heh heh. That was in reference to wellwisher's dumb-cluck attempt to minimize CO[sub]2[/sub] pollution by equivocating over carbonic acid. As I recall the 19th century chemists either referred to CO[sub]2[/sub] directly as carbonic acid, and/or they simply assumed that enough of it formed freely in the presence of water vapor and heat/irradiance to lump the two under the same name. That of course was all in pursuit of good science, unlike what wellwisher is here for.

    Some thread on this subject came up a while back, which referred to a debate that took place ca.1900 in which one scientist believed the other had underestimated the influence of water vapor on the lab measurements of heat absorption of CO[sub]2[/sub]. Of course this was picked up by recent fundie-deniers as some great weakness of climate science. The fact they are blindly ignoring is that water vapor naturally saturates at some margin moderated by condensation, whereas there are no such hard limits to hinder the rise of CO[sub]2[/sub] concentrations. It's really dangerous logic. I'd hate to think there are people who process information so blindly who might actually be holding scalpels, or wearing badges . . . or making laws that even the level headed cops have to enforce.
     
  11. Maggnum Registered Member

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    You are talking about the debate between Arrhenius and Angstrom. Angstrom's arguments rested on lab work done by an assistant that was later shown to have been incorrectly performed. The arguments were wrong then, but as you say, those with some political axe to grind will blindly ignore the facts behind the debate and focus on Angstrom's demonstrably incorrect argument on CO[sub]2[/sub]saturation
     
  12. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    So nice to see yet another intelligent poster who is familiar with the history of it all. Welcome aboard!
     
  13. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    My opinion is that until recently we had a very lively religion forum here in which the culture wars were meted out. Now it's been taken over by a fascist, which seems to have pushed the fray up into the science threads. In any case we've posted enough debunking of religious myth (spanning everything from science to economics to social conservatism) to draw the cranks like flies--as if they were searching for phrases that might pop up in Google's top ten, like "proof that God exists" and occasionally be given a link here.

    I have only recently become aware of the level of effort being put forth to discredit science through pseudoscience. I was either too busy to notice it before or else I was only noticing the political forms of propagandizing. It's truly phenomenal. I can think of nothing that crystallizes it better than dishonesty. No honest person would claim to master the subject material that they obviously never studied. The pundits all seem to be saying that this is an organized attempt to keep the undereducated voters wired up, as if to think there is legitimate disagreement within the community of experts, which could give them reason to vote down regulation. The barely-literate person might even come here and witness the controversy, failing to understand that the detractors here all have some hidden agenda, that they are all undercover T-baggers of one kind or another.
     
  14. KitemanSA Registered Senior Member

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    You mean like the "97% of" ...?
     
  15. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Yes you know about this. The T-baggers seem to think the 1900 debate is some kind of smoking gun. In any case they like to flaunt it because the debate itself appeared in one of the major journals, in the comments section that follow the articles. That certainly makes it Swift Boat level of evidence for them to exploit. And while Angstom (son of the man associated with the unit of wavelength) was wrong, at least he was not attacking this from a religious and industrial stance. He actually had the science wrong. I also think he suffered some personality flaws stemming from riding his father's coattails. And as I recall he wasn't nearly as well schooled as Arrhenius, nor as well as the folks that preceded them.

    The key point is that the air can only hold so much water before it rains, hence the concentration is nearly perfectly stable globally, with only some mild variation as global temperatures rise. By contrast some phenomenal percentage of the biomass would die out from CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity (such as probably happened to primitive cyanobacteria in building oxygen levels) long before the Right Wing would acknowledge that they don't actually understand the chemistry they are pretending to ram down the throats of experts.
     
  16. Maggnum Registered Member

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    First, you are trying to bastardize the fallacy argument of Appeal to Authority or Appeal to Popularity, neither of which apply to the way the 97% consensus figure was used by rpenner in this instance. It is not a fallacy to refer to, or defer to, those whose expertise allows them to form an opinion of fact based on the expertise they have in a subject.

    You, on the other hand, are attempting to use the fallacy of Begging the Question. If you do not have a reasonable argument to make, perhaps you should defer to those who do?
     
  17. Maggnum Registered Member

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    Well said! :bravo: And pointing out that the rise in global temperatures is also bringing with it the fact of higher moisture content, leading to stronger and longer lasting rainfall events, thereby maintaining water vapour stability while doing nothing to change atmospheric co[sub]2[/sub] concentrations, while at the same time increasing the possibility of H[sub]2[/sub]O induced increases in warming seems to be lost on them. It beggars the mind how they can try to argue one against the other without any understanding of how the two may combine to really get things going!
     
  18. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed there is a stupid kind of irony in the pig-brained argument that we can rest on our laurels thanks to water vapor.
     
  19. KitemanSA Registered Senior Member

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    Do you mean those 97% who's primary expertise appears to be sucking at the taxpayer teat to pay their livelihood and who's credentials are heavily loaded toward the social and political "sciences"?
     
  20. Maggnum Registered Member

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    Oh, I'm sorry I thought we were talking about the 97% of climate scientists who believe that human caused CO[sub]2[/sub] loading of the atmosphere is causing the planet to warm, not the 33% of Americans who believe that all scientists are involved in a socialist conspiracy to steal their rights and freedoms!

    In that case, you are right, that IS a fallacy! Of course, no self respecting person discussing the science of climate change on a science board would stoop to making broad incorrect generalizations or claims of conspiracy in a failed attempt to hide their inability to carry on formal discourse of the subject at hand either right?

    Do you often degenerate into crude baiting and barely concealed bouts of self denigration while discussing issues of science?
     
  21. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    No, I think he means the 97% who are at least passingly familiar with the results of combining Simple harmonic motion or quantum mechanics, the conservation of mass and energy, and the Beer-lambert law to make predictions about the transparency of the earths atmosphere as a function of altitude to long wave IR radiation, and are currently engaged in trying to make the best predictions they can about how the extra energy retained by the atmosphere might be used to do work, and what the effects of the energy retained and work done might be on other systems sensitive to these results.
     
  22. KitemanSA Registered Senior Member

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    Right, those "predictions" that have not tracked with reality. Gee, we seem to have gone in a circle.

    Bsed on SIMPLE science, global warming SHOULD be happening. The fact that we have done such a poor job of modeling it suggests that the science isn't so simple after all.
     
  23. Maggnum Registered Member

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    A circle only in your mind! You state without reference that we have done a "poor job of modelling" despite having been informed earlier that the IPCC projections relating to climate surface temperatures alone do, in fact, track as per the lower end of the predictions from even as early as the first IPCC report in 1990. This is an easy check to make, by referencing the first IPCC report. Furthermore, the predictions of surface temperatures is only one aspect of the report's predictions.

    You are inflating the minutia. That's called "cherry picking"!
     

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